Stingless Beekeeping Services & Crop Pollination Consulting
In addition to running workshops in schools, Dr Tobias (Toby) Smith also offers other bee services to the wider community. This includes presenting lectures and workshops on native bees and pollination, splitting, transferring and honey harvesting stingless bee hives, and performing on-farm crop pollination assessments. Scroll below for more about each of these services. For more information, contact Toby today.
Proud to be an industry member of the
Australian Native Bee Association |
Hive splitting service
Toby will visit you and split your hive, and will provide the empty box required for splitting if you do not have your own. We use industry standard OATH hive boxes (20cm by 28cm), professionally made. We sell boxes made to the standard 25mm thick hoop pine, as well as modified OATH hives made with 31mm thick hoop pine (external dimensions the same as a standard OATH). All our hives have top and bottom split bars, for helping to ensure clean splits in the future. Toby will split your hive and provide instructional commentary as he goes. Toby offers split services in the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and northern NSW regions. In Spring each year, Toby also travels to Coffs Harbour and Newcastle to teach native bee workshops and offers split services during these trips. PLEASE NOTE: Unfortunately I am currently only able to offer hive services to existing/returning customers, and this is likely to remain the case throughout the warm months of 2023/2024. Sorry! |
Colony Transfers
Toby will visit you and transfer a bee colony from a rotting log or other natural location where the bees are currently vulnerable (e.g. water metre or rotting hive box) for you, and will provide the empty box required if you do not have your own. We use industry standard OATH hive boxes (20cm by 28cm), professionally made. We sell boxes made to the standard 25mm thick hoop pine, as well as modified OATH hives made with 31mm thick hoop pine (external dimensions the same as a standard OATH). All our hives have top and bottom split bars, for helping to ensure clean splits in the future. Toby will transfer the colony and provide instructional commentary as he goes. Toby offers transfer services in the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and northern NSW regions. PLEASE NOTE: Unfortunately I am currently only able to offer hive services to existing/returning customers, and this is likely to remain the case throughout the warm months of 2021/22. Sorry! |
Crop Pollination Consulting
Toby has pollination research experience in blueberry and macadamia, and also has on-farm pollination consulting and stingless bee keeping experience in both of these crops. Toby can advise you and your team on stingless bee management regimes and stocking rates, as well as in identifying and supporting wild pollinator insects on the farm. Toby also provides stingless bee hive management services to growers. While Toby's pollination expertise is in blueberry and macadamia, he does offer stingless bee management services to other crop growers too. |
Workshops and Lectures
Toby offers all sorts of lectures and workshops on bees and pollination, to all sorts of community groups. Toby can tailor the content of a lecture or workshop to the needs of your group, but usually presents on Australian bee diversity, stingless bee keeping and biology, crop pollination, and bee declines and conservation. When it comes to stingless bee keeping, Toby teaches evidence-based stingless bee keeping, believing that to be an effective manager of stingless bees you must first have an understanding of their biology and ecology. Lectures and workshops typically range from 1 hour to 3 hours. Toby regularly teachers native bee workshops for a range of local councils and other community groups along the east coast of Australia. |
Dr Tobias (Toby) Smith is a native bee researcher and commercial stingless bee keeper with a passion for community engagement and science communication. Since 2010 Toby has been presenting lectures and workshops to community groups on native bees and pollination. Toby has extensive experience teaching children and adults of a range of ages, from Kindergarten to University and adult education. In addition to teaching children, Toby has 12 years of experience teaching University students, on topics including ecology, entomology, pollination, and bee identification. Toby's research background is in understanding native bee communities in agricultural landscapes, the use of native bees in crop pollination, and native bee biology and ecology. Toby's current research is focused on stingless bee biology and the use of native bees in glasshouse/protected pollination (as well as open field crops), and Toby has recently written a book on the identification of Australian bees, targeted at university students and researchers (The Australian Bee Genera: An Annotated, User-Friendly Key - Download free PDF HERE). Toby's work time is divided among native stingless bee keeping, teaching on beekeeping and bee conservation to school children and adults, university teaching, and bee and pollination research. Five years ago, Toby's stingless bee keeping 'hobby' morphed into something more serious, and he has been managing native stingless bees commercially since. In the last five years Toby has propagated over 1000 new stingless bee hives, and manages hives in QLD and NSW. Toby also runs a stingless bee business on the Coffs Coast, called Coffs Harbour Native Bees.
For an entertaining and informative overview of Australian native bees and the secrets of their lives, listen to Toby chat with Sarah Kanowski on ABC Radio National's Conversations program HERE. Toby talks about adventures in tropical rainforest in search of rare bees, new bee species discoveries, keeping hives of native stingless bees, and the lives of Australia's biggest and smallest bee species. |
Ever wondered what the process of transferring a stingless bee colony into an artificial hive box looks like? Watch Toby transfer a colony of Tetragonula hockingsi native stingless bees into a hive box at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. In Toby's role as a researcher at the University of Queensland, Toby manages stingless bee hives in specially designed observation hives that can be used for studying these bees' behaviour inside the hive. Some of these were created using the process shown in this video, using wild colonies in urban structures around the university. |
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Looking for a simple bee-related activity to do at home? How about making some bee nesting blocks for some of the common solitary bee species. Toby teamed up with the City o Gold Coast Council's NaturallyGC program to produce this instruction video about making simple bee nest blocks at home. It's fun an easy, and will usually give you good results. Remember though, the best thing you can do to help native bees in the garden is plant more flowering plants. Once the flowers are taken care of, then you can get on an make some of these new homes too. |
The charismatic stingless bees are not only found in Australia, they are found in tropical regions around the world. This University of Queensland lecture by Toby gives an introduction on stingless bees globally, their biology, conservation, keeping and research frontiers. The video can be found on the Science at UQ YouTube page here. |
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